


the star to every wandering bark

by maelidify



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, in-canon this time though, john murphy continues to view the world in lowercase letters, now with added kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-05-17 04:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5854291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“i’m glad you survived,” she says softly, breaking into his head like the thief she is, and a nauseating gentleness floods through him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

1.  


it’s quiet on the boat. the rush of black water, the tension of night silence, the dim roar of the motor. a smile twists her mouth and john _tries_ not to look but fails completely.

  
he doesn’t know what to say to her. but here are the pure facts, the things he can remind himself of, the tangible realities: 

  
-she’s a thief. he can handle that. he’s not exactly morally scrupulous.  
-she probably isn’t trustworthy, for that reason. probably.  
-his entire life has been full of rejection and bullshit and there’s a quality to someone’s face, you know, when your life is like that. he sees it every time he looks in the mirror (not that there are mirrors on the ground) and that quality? he saw it the first time he saw her. her life was full of rejection and bullshit. the kind that makes you fight and bite and bleed and want to choke everyone around you.  
-there was no way he was getting on that damned boat and then he saw her on that damned boat and decided to get on that damned boat.  
-his feet just decided to do it, so whatever. the boat it was.  
-he really wants to touch her tattoo.  
-she held a knife to his throat once.  


“first time jaha and i crossed this,” he says, barely realizing he is talking, why is he talking? “that sea monster almost finished us off.”

  
he isn’t sure she hears him, what with the way she’s staring off at the water like a silent, ragged statue. he laughs at his poetic thought and then she speaks.

  
“there’s a trick to it.” she taps the fingers of her functional hand on the rail. “if the boat’s slow? bring food.”  


“or knock someone overboard,” he mutters. he wishes jaha could hear him, but _his deludedness_ is firmly ensconced in another hallucination of the city of light or whatever the fuck it actually is.

  
emori eyes him at that. she must have noticed that only he and jaha survived the trip. simple math, and all that. plus, it was possible more of them would have survived had she not stolen their supplies.

  
well, unlikely. but possible. anything was possible. he clings to the bitter thought, holds it between his teeth in case he begins to _trust her_ or something. fool me twice. fool my feet into walking aboard. fool me into caring.   


“i’m glad you survived,” she says softly, breaking into his head like the thief she is, and a nauseating gentleness floods through him. she’s still meeting his gaze. it’s dark but her eyes reflect the sliver of moon that shows through the clouds.  


“no thanks to you.” yes, that bitterness, still there. it’s familiar, comforting, tastes like copper.  


she doesn’t balk, though. “i left you with directions.”

  
“ _a_ direction. singular.”  


“it was a good direction, though.” there it is again: the half-smile. he wishes he could look away, so he does, at her hands on the rail. at the one she keeps covered up, and at the bared one, which is clenched. there’s a cut on her middle finger.

  
he moves closer.  


he doesn’t know why. he just does.

  
“got me to the promised land,” he concedes. “which was nice for all of two hours.”

  
“the bunker?” she guesses after a pause, which means she’s been there. he wonders what she’s stolen from that place, how there was anything left (let alone enough to last him three months).

  
he nods and realizes that the bunker is literally the last thing he wants to talk about with her or anyone ever for the rest of his life, so he changes the subject.

  
“how’d that happen?” he looks at her hand, touches the cut. it’s a slash down the folds of her knuckle. some blood comes off on the pad of his thumb and he looks at it, not knowing what to do with it.

  
“hm,” she says. “i have no idea.”

  
and their eyes meet and he summons the bitterness again and turns away.

  
he turns away but can feel her in back of him, the shape of her a few feet away, warm and unknowable. untrustworthy. _stupid murphy_. grounders get hurt all the time. 

  
they’re smart enough not to let it bother them. she’s smart enough to be used to pain. why isn’t he? his brain snags, for a moment, on months trapped in his own head, his sins playing on repeat through his dreams, the way he wore his voice to shards with screaming--

  
he wipes the blood on his sleeve. it remains like a stain. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I want to do some (mostly) in-canon drabbles for these two as season three progresses. Maybe I'll diverge from canon? Maybe not? Maybe smut, eventually? 
> 
> Also, how exciting is it that we're actually getting to know Emori as a character? What an adorable lil murderous scamp.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

after they commit some casual robbery and murder (not that john needs more blood on his hands, but it wasn’t _strictly_ his fault) they find themselves back on the water, and they slow the boat down after an hour, sailing away from the setting sun.

there are reeds in the river and they brush the boat gently. john doesn’t know why he notices that, but he’s doing that thing again, that thing where he wants to look everywhere but at emori, even if she’s the only thing he wants to see. he tries not to think of her lips brushing his cheek. he’d forgotten what that felt like; the last kiss he’d received had been from his mother, before everything at home went to shit. he tries not to think about the ark either, or that delusional son of a bitch he’d finally left behind with emori’s brother, or the way emori’s mouth twists when she grins, the soft dimple in her chin.

he tries not to think of how she can make his cheeks hurt from smiling.

“what now?” he finds himself saying. she’s steering but not really steering, touching the boat’s controls gently but leaning down every now and then to rummage through her bag. she hands him a crust of bread and he accepts it, stale as it is, because hunger is burning a hole in his gut.

“we’ll figure it out,” she says casually, and he guesses that _figure it out_ means stealing, probably, and reporting to whoever else she steals for. he wonders if she ever steals for herself.

“you ever steal something for no good reason? just because you see something you like?” he asks. as good small talk as any. he takes a swig of water from their shared canteen as she considers his question.

“something i like? sounds like a good reason to me,” she says, looking at him like a challenge. the same sharp softness her face adopted when she said _“i guess you’re just gonna have to keep an eye on me.”_ he takes another clumsy sip and water drips down his mouth to his neck.

she smiles a little, but she tugs her right sleeve down and moves over to where he’s sitting. “here,” she says, wiping the water with her sleeve and letting the fabric fall away, leaving her hand on his neck. her fingers press against the skin there gently, as though she’s fascinated with its softness. she runs her thumb down his adam’s apple, pressing.

he stiffens. something hardens in her face and she moves away.

“i never would have, you know,” she says. the ghost of her hand is still on his neck, burning a hole there like the hole in his stomach. hunger of some sort.

“would have what?”

“slit your throat.” she says it lightly, like she was talking about the weather instead of threats and homicide. she is looking away though, her good hand tightening the cloth around its bigger counterpart.

he can’t say he he held it against her, the threats in the desert. he did at first, the immediacy of betrayal and how fucking _used_ to that he was, but he got it. life was tough for an outcast. you did what you needed to to survive.

(and he couldn’t say that she and her knife hadn’t appeared in a few drunken bunker dreams, but that was something she would _never_ find out about.)

so she obviously thinks that’s where his discomfort stems from. not her touching his _neck_ , but from _her_ touching his neck. he chuckles and lets her sideways glance sit for a few moments as he deliberates his next words.

“i had a lot of enemies when i first got here from the ark,” he starts. “made a lot of enemies,” he amends. “not that i didn’t have my reasons. i had friends, too. thought i did, anyway.”

does he want to do this? does he _really_ want to do this? the words spill out anyway.

“then, this guy was murdered,” he says. “jaha’s son. everyone knew i hated him, so they tried to hang me. succeeded for a few minutes. even though i didn’t do it, even though they had no proof. my enemies, and my friends.”

she listens, looking at him unrelentingly. grounders have no tolerance for weakness, he knows this from the time he spent being tortured by them. he shouldn’t tell her that just talking about it makes breathing more difficult, that a light touch on his throat can bring back the tightness, the way breath was impossible, the pathetic helplessness of being betrayed by everyone he thought he knew. the panic rising in his blood.

she knows, though. he can see it in the hardness of her brown eyes. he has said enough.

“when you’re a stain,” she says carefully, “you bring dishonor to your people. your existence is a curse. the maladies that strike your village are your fault. your blight is at the root of lost battles. there’s nothing for you to do but to die for crimes you never committed. or,” she concludes, “to leave.”

he realizes he hasn’t seen her left hand since the desert. which is too bad; the panes of it are fascinating, like something forged in fire. “well, that’s fucked up,” he says.

she laughs at that, the light returning to her face, softness to her eyes. “you’ve said that phrase before, but i don’t understand it.”

“why not?”

“you say it like it’s a bad thing, but fucking is a good thing.”

his skin feels hot. she is grinning and so is he, so hard that his face hurts, but when it comes down to it, he realizes he doesn’t mind one bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It looks like Emori isn't going to be in the next few episodes? So this will probably drift (like their boat) into AU land.


	3. Chapter 3

3.  
  
she’s a marginally horrible person and he doesn’t know why he finds that comforting, but he does.

  
she suggests the plan when they’re still on the boat. the sun is bleeding into the water and murphy is wondering how, exactly, the sky can have so many colors and if the skin on emori’s face is rough and leathery from the desert, and whether he’ll ever have the balls to find out.  
  
  
it’s been a day and a half since they left he-who-talks-to-holograms. they’ve survived on river water and a rabbit she stabbed when they stopped to rest. she carries salt with her, and strips of the meat are preserved in her bag, the only meal they allow themselves as they plan their next course of action.

  
“otan and i used to steal from passersby like this,” she says, and explains how. he listens as the sun spills dark red on her skin; her tattoo looks like a slash across her cheekbones. her eyes are hard. she hasn’t spoken of her brother since he held a knife to her throat.

  
“i’m down,” he says once she finishes explaining. “one thing though. we take their stuff, we don’t kill them.”  
  
  
she watches him carefully and he wonders how many lives she’s taken in however many years she’s been around. two’s enough for him, personally. he’s seen how senselessly people die on the ground, almost died himself a few times. almost killed himself. he wants to take a large step back from death, is all.

  
“agreed,” she says and points at the sky, the grimy beige of her hand wrapping turning to shade. “it’s dark. we’ll rest in the trees.”  
  
  
\---  
 

they set up camp where the trees are dense, streaking their clothing with dirt for camouflage. they must be back in trikru land by now, if murphy remembers his geography right.

  
“hey, emori,” he says, offhand, “what clan are you, anyway?”

  
“i have no clan,” she says, and it rolls off her tongue so easily that he imagines she has said it a few too many times. 

  
their camp isn’t much; they don’t want to attract predators with smoke and flame and neither of them need creature comforts to fall asleep. the night before, they’d nodded off in shifts on the boat. this feels different, setting up a sleeping space and making rudimentary traps to hear intruders. it feels domestic, in a fucked up way. she sits next to where he rests cross legged, back against a tree, and he can feel the warmth of her skin where her arm presses just _slightly_ against his.

  
“sorry, what clan _were_ you?” he corrects himself, because he doesn’t know how to shut up and be polite. he figures she doesn’t care about politeness.

  
she shrugs the question off. “the past is _tricova_.”

  
“which means?”

  
“shadow.” she closes her eyes. “it doesn’t matter.”  
  
  
he laughs bitterly. “shadows always matter.”  
  
  
“maybe.”

  
she’s being evasive. suddenly, anger flares through him. not that his life has ever hinged on consistency, but he’s still forsaking the last thread of familiarity to travel with her and he still doesn’t know who she is. he still doesn’t know if he should trust her. 

  
he doesn’t know _why_ he trusts her. because he definitely does for some reason and he can’t seem to stop.  

  
he pulls away from her and she looks up at him questioningly.

  
“have you ever been loyal to anything,” he asks, “in your entire life? just wondering.” bitter words; he’s a bitter man. he doesn’t know what loyalty tastes like anymore.

  
she’s glaring too, now. he can tell in the branch-fractured moonlight. it’s a hunter’s moon. he learned that term on the ark and now, with the blood-velvet sky hiding above him, he finally knows what it looks like.

  
“yes. my brother,” she says, and she doesn’t mask the hurt in her face this time. it crinkles her skin and he doesn’t know who she’s angry at or, perhaps, who she _isn’t_ angry at.

  
she doesn’t know what loyalty tastes like, either. he remembers how easily otan pulled a knife on her. he remembers the glint of her knife in the desert, how she was stronger than she looked. and he remembers the knife he claimed from shrapnel when they first got to the ground and how he lost it one night. how it ended up next to the fingers of wells jaha.

this is all they’ve ever known.

  
he touches her face. he was wrong; her face isn’t hard or soft but _warm_ and _alive._ rough in some places, scarred. fighting skin. he runs his fingers down her cheekbones. she’s still glaring at him and it’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

  
“what about you, john?” she doesn’t know how to whisper, he thinks, but when her voice softens, it _creaks_ like a rusty door. “who are you loyal to?”

  
it’s a challenge. _myself_ is the answer he’d normally give. but it isn’t honest; it sits like a stone in his mind. he thinks of their proximity; he’s crouching over her as she sits against the tree. a vulnerable position, even though she could knock him flat if she had the mind to.

               
for some reason, she trusts him too.

  
her face is in both his hands now. “damned if i know,” he answers and then they’re kissing, and everything tastes like dirt and blood and life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued :) 
> 
> (in other news: our dirty duo is officially canon! It would have been nice to see their first kiss, but at least there's plenty of room for fanfiction...)


	4. Chapter 4

murphy hasn’t kissed anyone since before he was locked up on the ark. hasn’t wanted to, really, save a few confusing moments back at the drop site but those were  _ tricova _ , as emori’d say, and emori was warm and her arms were wrapped around him and her good hand was in his hair.    
  


the anger of a few moments earlier has faded to something gentler, more confusing. he hates how he wants to cradle her head in his hands. he pulls at her hair instead and she lets out a sharp moan, her own grip on his hair tightening, urging him on.    
  


her mouth is soft, so soft, but he drags himself away from it and nips at her throat. their positions have changed some; she’s on his lap now, knees around his hips, and everything feels fast, fast, fast. another kiss to her throat and his groin tightens and she bites his ear sharply, her other hand pressing into his back.    
  


a gasp, his. fast, fast, fast. her skin tastes like dirt and he’s sure his does, too. he likes it-- it’s raw and honest, the only good things that can be said about the ground. he doesn’t want to paw at her breasts clumsily but that’s exactly what he does, letting go of her hair, and she laughs into his neck. 

  
where she’s now kissing him. he freezes at the pressure and she stops, leaning back, her hand coming up to caress his face.   
  


“is that okay?” she says with her soft voice, her door-creaking voice. he nods and she kisses his throat again, gentle with her soft, chapped lips. it feels like a secret and he leans into her, comforted and turned on and he doesn’t _ fucking _ know. her breasts are small and soft underneath his hand and he wants to unpeel all her layers but he also wants to stay right here, tangled with her, unmoving. 

  
her left hand tightens on his arm. barely thinking, he grasps it in his and she stills. he wants to unpeel the wrapping around it. he wants to feel her skin against his lips.

  
so he looks at her, a question that he can’t form because he can’t think of words right now, only her scent and the darkness in her eyes and her quick muscles. she looks back and nods, and he removes the gloved wrapping from her hand, slowly, slowly.  

  
her hand looks like a tree branch in the moonlight, in the darkness. she tenses the long fingers and he brings it to his face, to his mouth. runs his teeth over her skin, places gentle kisses in the creases between her fingers. she shudders into him, legs tightening around him.

  
“you’re nice,” she gasps into his ear. he dry-thrusts and she moves her hand, her arms wrapping around him, nails digging into his back.

  
“no i’m not,” he says through gritted teeth. does he still remember how to do this? it’s been so long since he’s tried to please a girl but he palms the place between her legs, rubbing circles into her and she’s about to reach for  _ him _ , to where he’d be done for, when they hear a rustle in the bushes.   


  
footsteps. probably trikru. they still against one another, tense, breathing into one another’s mouths. he hears their voices, their language, and after they fade, they separate.

  
“back to the boat,” she says lowly.  
  


fucking figures. he lets out a long breath and runs his hand through his hair. “right.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> our boy needs more smooches (and screen time) and less gratuitous torture ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	5. 5.

they scamper back to the water, quiet as those radioactive critters that live in the trees.  


he’s tired but what they’ve just been doing still buzzes through his skin. electrocution is on the very short list of bad things that haven’t been done to him, but he wonders if this is what it feels like-- fried and frazzled, something burning through him and consuming him, snagging his exhaustion in its wake. it sucks but it’s a good kind of suck.  


he catches his thought on that, breathes it out like smoke.

  
back on the boat, they cast off from the grassy shore and breathe slowly, softly, looking at the passing land with caution and not daring to use the engine. john’s eyes feel heavy but he steals a glance at emori and he doesn’t want them to be heavy. maybe he never wants to close them again.  


because her hair is even more tangled than usual and her skin is smeared with dirt and she hurts his eyes, she’s so beautiful.  
  
  
this isn’t like him. he just wants to touch her hair. this isn’t like him. he wants to make her smile again, and moan a little bit too.  
  
  
“hear anything?” he ventures after a good fifteen minutes have passed, or maybe a lifetime.  
  
  
“nothing,” she says. she climbs down to the flat part of the ship and he clambers after her. this is okay, he decides. everything since he came to the ground has been shit, but this, this is okay.  
  
  
he tries to sit a respectable distance from her, but she laughs.  
  
  
“you’re a child,” she says.  
  
  
“what’s that make you?” he counters because he doesn’t know what else to say.  
  
  
she reclines on her back, looking up at the massive tapestry of sky, a murky shade of violet-black above them.  
  
  
“come here,” she says, not answering his admittedly childish question. he does because he’s slowly but surely becoming an idiot for this, for her.  
  
  
they lay on the boat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. there it is again, the idea that things are okay. that this is an acceptable moment to live in for a while. then she shifts, facing him on her side, and he cranes his head toward her.  


“my brother told me a story once,” she says lowly, forehead almost touching his, “about a prince who refused his destiny and ran away with a crow.”  
  
  
“that’s the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard.”  
  
  
she laughs and he laughs too. they’re sharing air. her nose is soft against his.

 

“i thought so too,” she says.  


“why are you telling me this? bedtime story?”  
  
  
she touches her hand against his arm in a curious manner, halfway between holding and pushing away. “believe in destiny, john?”  
  
  
“not for a minute.”  
  
  
“me neither,” she replies. it’s true, he can tell, but she’s looking at him with dark, dark eyes and he can tell that she believes in _this_ , whatever this is.

  
heaven help him, he does too.  
  
  
“so, tomorrow,” he says. he’s slipping into sleep, he can feel it. the boat is hard under his back and the night is chilly, but he’s more relaxed than he’s ever been and he tries not to think of why that might be.  
  
  
she smiles. “we start our plan.”  
  
  
“who gets to be the corpse?”  
  
  
“that’d be you.”  
  
  
they’ve shifted; his nose is by her ear and he laughs into her hair.  
  
  
“of course,” he says, but he can’t summon the bitter bite that usually accompanied his words. “wouldn’t have it any other way.”  
  
  
“sleep, john,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like a half bad plan to him. none of it does.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to get them to full-on cuddle, but they were both too afraid of vulnerability. This brings us to a reasonable parting point; we know where they go from here. 
> 
> (So, lots of love to the memori fandom after last episode. And to the John Murphy fandom in general. And to John Murphy in general. :/)


End file.
